For a French borrowing in grammar, how about using the same word for ownership and past participle? I have a copy of Jackson’s E&M book. I have taken an E&M course. Same word. Likewise, French also uses the same word for posession and past participle. Is this also true in German?
Jomo:
English has largely abandoned the Germanic form of making plurals in favor of the “s” ending. Is that not a grammatical influence from French?
I’ve just spoken briefly with a Filipino coworker about this. He said that Spanish is a big influence in the language. Also, he said that because he comes from the north of the country - about 500 miles north of Manila - he speaks a very different dialect to other areas. There are many different dialects.
This is all based on what he told me in the 5 minutes we spoke - I know nothing about the subject personally.
I forgot to add: He also said that English is the main language taught in schools. I guess this could partly be the reason why you hear pieces of English right in the middle of Tagalog dialect (my opinion, not his).
Yep! 
I’ll have to check the OED tomorrow at work to see what it says about “have” and “-s”. As a guess, I think those may both be non-Germanic (and thus probably from Norman French).
samarm, thanks for inputing on the original question, and with facts too!
If you’ve ever listened to Japanese comercial, you’ll hear something similar:
long japanese rambling GRAND OPENNING contuned in japanese
Some languages, like Tagolog and Japanese, are prolific borrowers. Some, like Mandarin or Icelandic, even make up “native” words for things like “computer”. In the latter case, though, I’d bet English slips in a lot since most Icelanders speak at least passable English.
IANAL ( linguist in this case ), but my understanding is that Old English and the Norse spoken by Canute’s Danes was mutually intelligible to some extent.
A result of creolization or simply a lack of divergence between West and North Germanic languages at that point?
Certainly at the time of the earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms we see infiltration and migration not just from the eponymous Angles and Saxons ( and Jutes and Frisians ), but also from all over northern Europe - It has been contended that the king buried at Sutton Hoo was probably Redwald of North Anglia and that he was in fact a scion of a Swedish dynasty.
At what point can Old English and Old Norse be called separate languages? Or were they - were they merely closely related dialects? And if so, is the phrase “creolization” even appropriate?
- Tamerlane
Samarm is correct in that most schools conduct education in English. Around Manila it is quite easy to find someone who speaks English, and generally quite well at that. Considering that most Filipino media companies are located in Manila, and that most urban Filipinos are familiar with English, it makes sense that English would be frequently used in Tagalog sentance constructions. The same thing happens here in the San Francisco Bay Area (though by no means to the same degree) with respect to Spanish. (E.g. A sentance I heard last weekend on the local news: “There will be a fiesta in the civic plaza in honor of Cinco de Mayo.”)
Outside of Manila is a different matter as English is far less common. Only those well off are able to attend schools where English is the operating language. The more commonly attended schools in this situation teach in Tagolog as well as the local dialect/language, with English being treated in a similar manner as a foreign language would be in a US high school. This results in most Filipinos being very multilingual.
As to why, the reason given by jrmz03 is right on. When my family gets together is is quite a trip to listen to them talk as they switch from Tagalog to English to Spanish to Cebano to Visayan and back to Tagalog, often within the same sentance. As to whether or not that makes Tagalog a creole language or just very malleable (rather than just confusing), I leave to the experts above.
Tam:
I wondered when you would show up here. Yes, that is exactly what I was getting at. I think a good modern analogy would be Spanish and Portuguese. Would we talk about a creole language that (hypothetically) resulted from a melding of these two groups?
Or even Spanish and Italian for that matter…?
Anglo-saxon is a West Germanic language; Old Norse is North Germanic (to repeat the point). That’s a fairly wide separation. I think modern Spanish and Italian are more close than A-S and ON were. Spanish are Portuguese are definitely closer.
The similarity between the two (A-S and ON) is due to the lack of divergence. But the simplification of word endings is due to convergence in the hybridization zone. I think that merits being called creolization.
This is an excellent point. Division of languages, both spatially and temporally, is at some level arbitrary. If we look at the Germanic languages (before the mass migrations and other complicating factors) we’d see a near continuum of dialects. The same thing occurs around the Mediterranean coast from Gibraltar to Provence to Sicily in the post-Roman era (or anytime before modern standardization started to have an effect).
So, basically, we’re reduced to describing local effects (hybridization here, loan words there, vowel shifts, etc), and have to avoid general, ambiguous statements.
John Mace’s erroneous usage of the terms *dialect, creole, pidgin, *and language aside, linguists actually do use the terms with particular meanings. Hern already addressed that.
The situation in the Philippines is akin to the situation in China: different languages are called dialects of one language. An example is those people who refer to Ilokano as a dialect of Tagalog. The most extreme example was an individual of my acquaintance who insisted that the Spanish of Zamboanga City is a dialect of Tagalog because it’s spoken in the Philippines.
The West/North division is a good point. I’m guessing here, but that would put the A-S/ON split at what-- about 2 or 3k yrs before the Danish Invasion of England? The Spanish/Italian split can probably be put at 1.5k yrs ago. Again, I’m somewhat guessing at the dates. So, all things being equal, it’s likely that A-S and ON could be as much as “twice” as distinct as Spanish/Italian. Now, I recoginze that I’m playing fast and loose with rates of change and how much interaction the ancient and modern world had, but I can certainly see that my analogy might not have been too good.
I’m still more interested in the Old English/Fench creole issue wrt to Middle English. Gotta do some research on that one.
Monty:
You must be pretty unfamiliar with linguistics if you think you could a group of linguists together and get them to agree on which “languages” of the world fall into the definition of “language, dialect, creole, or pidign”. Sure, those terms have definitions, but applying the definitions to the real world is where the fun begins.
Language. There are many different languages. Many are about as similar as Spanish and Portuguese. Many are as different as English and German.
[And now I’ve begun a whole nother debate about the distinction between language and dialect.]
[Oops, now I’ve seen that Monty has already begun that debate.]
OK, Terminus, but I was only repeating what he told me, and he was born and raised there. Of course, he could have used “dialects” mistakenly.
samarm, I’m Filipino myself. The whole language vs dialect issue was a matter of some debate within the Philippines itself. It’s now generally accepted that they are indeed different languages (within each of which are several dialects). If not, then you might as well call all of the many tongues of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia as different dialects of the same language.
Sure, I can see that. He did say that what he spoke (call it what you will) was very different to what they spoke in Manila.
500 miles north of Manila, he probably spoke Ilokano. I understand not a word, even though my grandfather was from the area and my mother speaks it. I understand my sisters are trying to learn it, mostly for the colorful swearing. Heck, it sounds like you’re swearing even if you’re being polite. Aside from Tagalog, I understand Cebuano and Ilonggo, similar languages both spoken in the southern regions. (Don’t know if I can still speak them; it’s been too long.)
Actually, I’m mighty familiar with Linguistics.
Intentionally disregarding the common usage in the actual field isn’t my idea of fun. Apparently it is yours.
No, it is not. It goes directly back to Old English plural forms in -s. (OE had more than one plural form, and -s was one of them, the one that survived.) Plurals with -s can be traced back to Common Germanic, and before that all the way back to Proto-Indo-European.
I will grant you that French also having the plural with -s might have encouraged Middle English speakers to favor that form of plural. But it did not originate with French. The French, Spanish, and Portuguese plurals with -s came from the Latin accusative plural form, and that of course came from Proto-Indo-European, so the English and French plurals ultimately share the same source.
No way. You mean 3500 BC? Heck, at that point, Proto-Germanic probably hadn’t even separated from Proto-Balto-Slavic yet. Proto-Indo-European itself wasn’t all that much older (maybe 5000 BC). The separation of Common Germanic is thought to have been around the 1st century AD.
Yeah, something like that. But back then, what we now call Spanish and Italian would have been essentially still Vulgar Latin. I have read a vernacular document from the year 535, and frankly it was Vulgar Latin with some inflections missing, not yet Romance. The first known document in Romance, the Serment de Strasbourg, dates from the year 842 and looks more like a blend of Vulgar Latin and Catalan than French.